A Saga of Copyright : Authors Guild, et al.v. Google.

A Saga of Copyright : Authors Guild, et al.v. Google.

A saga can commonly be held to be a long tale involving many parties interacting within a complex environment seeking to overcome both their own flaws and outside forces. A classic example of this would be the Eddas of Iceland. While not as long running or (as yet) as bloody, there is a similarity with Icelandic sagas the multitude of legal pleadings of the parties before a judge and the search for justice & fairness in the dispute which has embroiled Google Books; which continues as per the latest in Authors Guild, et al.v. Google.

The background to this being Google has positioned itself as the the premier search engine company in the global economy (see "How Google test Software" by Wittaker as an interesting insight into how this is achieved). The mission goal for this company can be captured in a desire to allow the world's information to be search-able. As a large part of this heritage of information is present outside the digital format in paper based books, in 2004 Google began to convert the physical to the binary by scanning in books. This however was done without the permission of the copyright owner's permission (leaving aside books which were in public domain or without know authors) and the US based Author's Guild in 2005 brought a copyright infringement suit with Google's defense being that of "fair use".

This term original from the US case of Folsom v Marsh (1841) and facts revolved around a book of one of the American rebel leaders, a George Washington, and the correctness of being able to quote sections of that book. Four main elements of allowing such quotes were enumerated as being.

1- the purpose of such quotes and if these were of commercial nature

2- the original work and if it were copyrighted.

3- the percentage of the work quoted

4- how this might effect the commercial aspect of the work

The Saga initially looked to have a fairly benign ending with an agreement between the parties but this was rejected on the grounds of unfairness, The excellent IPKitten site has commented that the which ever side is the victor, it will mark a key ruling on how "fair use" is to be viewed in terms of transformative (from physical to digital) copyrighted material.

In the European context, how the moral rights of the author might be effected given the less than perfect technology that underlies scanning, could also be an issue. Either way, the Google Books like any good Saga will likely continue to provide years more topics of interest.